Loosely… very loosely… inspired by an incident from last night, in which I woke up to the sound of my side gate swinging open and a couple guys looking around my side yard, then a knock at the side gate, then:
“I think someone’s home.”
“Should we just go to the next one?”
Having been through a home invasion burglary in 1998, that freaked me out. Like, yeah, they were apparently leaving me alone, but I have a neighbor who’s an elderly widow and another who’s a single mom with young kids.
And what the Hell did they expect in the middle of the night? People to be away on vacation, I guess…
I quickly threw something on in the dark and grabbed my phone, then I thought I could hear them talking in my driveway so I went to the office to peek out to see so I could give a description of the prowlers when I called 911.
Except what I saw weren’t prowlers, they were 2 RCMP officers and a cop car.
Huh?
Well, 911 was already here.
Anyway, I went downstairs to talk to them and find out what gives. They were looking for a missing girl who’d called 911 and said she felt funny and then the call dropped out and I guess they could tell it was my neighborhood by the cell data. I invited them to look around my back yard in case she’d stumbled in there, though I hadn’t heard the gate before they came and it’s loud and squeaky with a metal decoration on the back that clangs like a MF even just opening it. They didn’t find anything and kept searching the neighborhood and I went back to bed.
Hope they found her and the girl was OK; in this town it’s probably either an OD or someone spiked her drink.
But anyway, when I woke up this morning I had the idea for a Noah’s Archipelago graphic novel or something like that inspired by a middle-of-the-night knock from the RCMP: Ursula keeps sneaking out in the middle of the night and getting brought home by the cops… no drugs, of course, since she’s 8, but I can see her getting in other kinds of trouble as in this morning’s quick sketch.
In related news, apparently during the US civil war there were rumors of Confederates acting as privateers on the west coast and possibly even burying gold in Victoria. Highly unlikely, of course, but an enterprising young sleuth like Ursula might be of the “trust, but verify” mindset and decide to do some digging… literally.
(And the cops stopping her and taking her home would just be proof to her that the rumors are real and there is gold in them thar local ballparks that the government doesn’t want her to finders keepers.)
Who knows how long this will take me to get around to—after all, I’m still nowhere near done a Ricky B Rat graphic novel I started in 2023 and work is very slow on finishing the first Noah’s Archipelago anthology that I also started in 2023—but I have dutifully made some brainstorming notes for it.
(PS: I know I usually don’t blog on this site, but I figured maybe it’s a good idea or at least fun to occasionally write a bit about my creative process as it pertains to Noah et al and this is as good a place as any to start. Also, I have plans to start adding some other Noah-related writing here in the future. Stay tuned… or don’t… whatever…)
